Systems Neuroscience

Laboratory of Neural Information

Yoshio Sakurai, Ph.D.
It is often said that the ultimate goal of brain science is to scientifically clarify mechanisms of mind. But what should we target in the brain and how should we investigate it ? The present lab postulates that mind is nothing but information being encoded and processed in the working brain. We, the members of the lab, investigate animal’s brains when they are encoding and processing specific information during performance of specific behavioral tasks. We would like to know what neurons and circuits work in what manners and in which structures by experimental studies combining behavioral experiments (operant conditioning), electrophysiology (multi-neuronal recording), histochemistry (immunostaining), and/or transgenic animal (optogenetics).
The main targets are higher functions, e.g., recognition of external stimuli, formation of various memory, context judgment, and reward anticipation. The focused structures are hippocampus, amygdala, basal ganglia, association cortex, motor cortex, sensory cortex, and others. We record and analyze multi-neuronal activities from rats and mice when they are learning various memory tasks. We also train the animals to increase or decrease their multi-neuronal activities. The former study will clarify actual features and plasticity of functionally connected neuronal populations, i.e., cell assemblies, encoding various information in the brain. The latter will show the possibility of operation of cell assemblies and can be a basic study for brain-machine interfaces. In another research project, we employ the olfactory structure as a model system to investigate neural mechanisms realizing experience and internal-state dependent information processing of external stimuli. The method for the project is a combination of behavioral analysis, electrophysiology, optogenetics and molecular biology. We also would like to know how information in the frontal-subcortical system realize adaptive behaviors. We expect that the electrophysiology can detect specific neuronal activities for the adaptive behaviors and the optogenetics can prove causality between the neurons firing and the behaviors.

Research topics

Dynamics of cell assemblies underlying coding and modification of various information